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Portable Grid Environment by Sun ONE Grid Engine and KNOPPIX
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<B>Portable Grid Environment by Sun ONE Grid Engine and KNOPPIX</B>
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Kenichi Hayashi, Kazuaki Yamagata and Hisao Shibuya
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Sun Microsystems K.K.
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    Grid Computing is becoming popular, making headway from research
labs to production use at enterprises. The cost of grid middleware
installation is high, however, conflicting with a grid computing goal
of boosting productivity. In this paper, we show a way of
implementing a grid environment easily and quickly using Sun ONE Grid
Engine and KNOPPIX.

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1. Introduction
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We read news about Grid Computing almost everyday on newspapers,
magazines, and on the Internet. But when we actually try to use it,
for instance by installing Globus Toolkit, we get stuck in the
process. The manual does not always help, and we end up spending
inordinate amounts of time just to install the software. While one of
the main purposes of Grid Computing is to boost productivity through
efficient use of distributed computing resources, setting up a Grid
environment currently takes so much time that it can actually
decrease productivity. What we need is a means to launch a Grid
environment quickly and with ease. This paper shows how to deploy a
Grid environment easily using Sun Microsystems' 
<A HREF="http://www.sun.com/software/grid/">Sun ONE Grid Engine</A>
(in japanese <A HREF="http://jp.sun.com/grid/">Sun ONE Grid Engine</A>)
middleware and 
<A HREF="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/">KNOPPIX</A>
, a Linux distribution bootable
from CD-ROM.
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2. Sun ONE Grid Engine
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<P>Sun ONE Grid Engine was placed on the market by Sun Microsystems in 2000
as middleware for building cluster grids and enterprise grids (campus
grids). Today, the middleware is used at more than 7,000 sites
worldwide. Grid Engine supports both Solaris and Linux.
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<P>Cluster grid is the simplest grid configuration, typically used by
enterprises to combine all computing resources within a department as
a large virtual computer. A cluster grid normally uses computing
resources residing within the firewall, and its users are known
members of the enterprise. Therefore the cluster grid requires no
additional security and authentication functions. That is why Grid
Engine does not come with those functions. There is no need to obtain
authentication from a Certificate Authority (CA) when using a grid
through Grid Engine. Users can deploy the grid environment simply by
installing Grid Engine on Master node (for resource management),
Submit node (for job submission), and Execution node (for job
execution). Most grid environments in use today are cluster grids
consisting of a small number of workstations and servers. Grid Engine
can offer a quick solution for this type of grid.
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<P>The source code of Grid Engine has been published as part of an 
<A HREF="http://gridengine.sunsource.net/">open source project</A>
. Thanks to this effort, the code has been
ported to AIX, HP-UX, IRIX and other UNIX versions, meaning a grid
can be deployed under a cross-platform environment. With Grid Engine,
users can easily take advantage of Grid Computing starting with a
cluster grid environment, without any initial hardware investment.
Users can also cost-effectively upgrade to an enterprise grid
environment that connects several departments, and even to an
Internet-based global grid in conjunction with 
<A HREF="http://gridengine.sunsource.net/project/gridengine/howto/globus/globus.html">Globus</A>
.
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3. KNOPPIX
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KNOPPIX, a Linux environment bootable from CD, was developed by Mr. Klaus
Knopper of Germany based on Debian GNU/Linux. A localized version for

<A HREF="http://unit.aist.go.jp/it/knoppix/">Japan</A>
has been released by the National Institute of
Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). The KNOPPIX
distribution does not have to be installed on the hard drive. Any PC
can become Linux-enabled when booted up from a KNOPPIX CD, which only
takes a few minutes. KNOPPIX has highly developed device recognition
and auto configuration capabilities. When loaded on a PC equipped
with a network device, KNOPPIX automatically configures the DHCP
settings, and the machine can access the network as soon as the boot
sequence is over. The default setting for the hard disk is read-only,
ensuring that Windows files can be accessed from KNOPPIX but not
modified or deleted.
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<P>KNOPPIX comes with a variety of applications, including MS Office-compatible
OpenOffice suite. The bundled applications can be changed depending
on the purpose of use. For example, KNOPPIX has an iso image called
<A HREF="http://holst.sm.fukuoka-u.ac.jp/">KNOPPIX/Math</A>
, which comes with LaTeX, Maxima, surf, and
Geomview applications. When downloaded and burned on a CD, these math
applications can be used on a PC booted with this disc.
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4. Preparing a KNOPPIX CD image for Grid Engine environment
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As explained in the preceding paragraph, applications bundled with
KNOPPIX can be flexibly changed by rearranging the iso image. To use
a KNOPPIX-enabled PC as an Execution node for Grid Engine jobs, users
only need to set the Master node and KNOPPIX as follows:
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On Master node:
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Register the hosts likely to be accessed by the DHCP server as Execution nodes.
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On KNOPPIX:
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<LI>Add the administration account sgeadmin
<LI>Add a Grid Engine communication port
<LI>nfs mount Grid Engine directory of the Master node
<LI>Add hosts allocated by the Master node and DHCP server to /etc/hosts
<LI>Add a script to change the host name to conform to the IP address allocated by the DHCP server
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<IMG SRC="grid-knoppix.jpg">
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Figure 1. KNOPPIX in Grid Engine environment
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The sgeadmin account is required to use Grid Engine. Any port can be used
as Grid Engine communication port and the default setting is 536.
When the number of nodes is large, it is better to use copies of Grid
Engine files to avoid nfs conflict. Here, however, we have used nfs
mount to generalize the CD image. Since KNOPPIX uses the default host
name of knoppix, we have added a script to /etc/init.d/rcsge to
convert the host name into one corresponding to the IP address given
by the DHCP server.
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After these settings have been modified, create a 
<A HREF="http://kinneko.homelinux.net/wiki/KnoppixOwn">new iso image</A>
and burn a CD. When a PC is booted using this CD, the PC
automatically becomes a Grid Engine Execution node and can receive
job allocation from the Master node. Since the CD image is
general-purpose, copies can be loaded onto other PCs to increase the
number of machines on a grid without limitation. Figure 1 shows an
example of KNOPPIX integration into Grid Engine environment.
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5. Conclusion
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A Grid Computing environment can be easily deployed using Sun ONE Grid
Engine and KNOPPIX. With copies of the properly prepared CD, the
number of machines on a grid can be easily increased without
limitation. With this CD, Windows PCs that are unused at night can be
rebooted and turned into nightly grid nodes, and laptops of students
in class may be temporarily borrowed for a demonstration of portable
grid resources. There are many other potential applications. In the
future, we plan to enhance the generality of settings and examine
practical deployment issues.
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